Recommended by Doug DeVita

A funny, witty, and ultimately heartbreaking glimpse into the frustrating vagaries and expectations to finding love in this age of apps swiping.

And now I’ve read the first of Weaver’s beach boy plays, and this is perhaps the most poetic and magically ambiguous of them all. While all three perfectly capture an adolescent moment of change, this one has a slight undertow of menace which adds an even more realistic — and alluring — tone to these tales of sexual awakening. Beautiful.

What is so fascinating about this LGTBQ version of Weaver’s “Two Boys on the Beach” is that none of the charm, wonder, bravado, and heartache of that moment in childhood when everything irrevocably changes is lost by the switching of one character’s gender. This is important to remember, because for some people it may change everything, but it shouldn’t because it doesn’t: it is still a beautiful play that gently captures those joyful/sad last moments of innocence we all experience, no matter our sexual orientation.

Oh, those last moments of innocence and that inevitable moment when one friend matures faster than the other...

Weaver captures all the charm, wonder, bravado, and heartache of that moment when everything irrevocably changes in this beautiful little masterpiece, at once as joyful and sad as it is in life.

Anyone who's ever felt hemmed-in by the holidays and/or become over them before they've even begun, Goldman-Sherman's Claus-trophobic comedy is for you. Delightfully tense and fall on the floor funny, this short is a gift for two older actors. Delicious fun.

While reading this unsettling play, I was reminded of the Frank Loesser song “Inchworm,” from the movie “Hans Christian Andersen.” In the song, Andersen sings a haunting refrain encouraging an inchworm to stop and think how beautiful marigolds are while in the background we hear students monotonously intoning an arithmetic lesson. Both Loesser’s song and Omorotionmwan’s play are lyrical pleas for the acceptance and beauty of non-conformity, with Omorotionmwan adding layers of fear and loss that make this play a devastating cautionary tale for our times.

Three geniuses take a yoga class... and all high-falutin’ hell — and wind — breaks loose. Fresh and funny.

A play in which the metaphor is the meaning, Stephen Kaplan’s “A Real Boy” stuns with its inventive theatricality, its well-placed humor, and particularly with its depth of feeling. A beautifully written, provocative, and haunting work of art.

There is so much beauty in this script it almost overwhelms, and I mean that in the best way possible. Dave Osmundsen's protagonist, Henry, is one of the most specifically engaging characters I've encountered in a long while, and he is wrought so tenderly one can't help but fall in love with him, fear for him, root for him, and ultimately cheer for him. I would love to see this script produced. Often.

Disturbing and gut-wrenching, this play will churn up deeply felt emotions and haunt you for days after reading it. Beautifully handled all the way through, Salisbury has written another unfortunately necessary piece of theater for out times.